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Top 10 Graphic Novels: 2012.

Chipman, Ian (author).

This list of the best graphic novels reviewed in Booklist over the past year showcases just how ambitious the medium has become, tackling everything from the minutiae of a masterpiece to, well, everything. —Ian Chipman

Kinetic compositions washed with Pirate-yellow hues and a narrative that traces both Clemente’s personal and athletic triumphs combine in this biography of the pioneering Puerto Rican baseball great.

Any Empire. By Nate Powell. Illus. by the author. 2011. Top Shelf, $19.95 (9781603090773).

Powell flashes his considerable cartooning talents in this complex, open-ended antiwar parable. The story follows three characters, first as children and then 10 years later, as their lives are upended by violence.

Returning to the arena of adolescent alienation that defined Ghost World (1997), and tossing in a lacerating takedown of superhero comics and pop culture, Clowes depicts a teen boy who derives low-level superpowers from smoking cigarettes.

In a kaleidoscopic epic of a concubine and a castrato set in a modern yet timeless Arabic society, Thompson shines light on issues of race, sexuality, religion, mysticism, and social inequity with soaringly ambitious artwork.

This apologia and casebook for Spiegelman’s graphic-novel masterpiece, Maus (1986), presents an array of interviews, notes, and artwork that articulately illuminates the work itself and the comics format as a whole.

One Soul. By Ray Fawkes. Illus. by the author. 2011. Oni, $24.99 (9781934964668).

With the biggest of life’s great questions in play, 18 different lives, each lifted from a different page in history, unfold simultaneously from the darkness of the womb to the silence of death.

A blistering condemnation of a state that has lost its people, this inside view of the disputed 2009 Iranian presidential election chronicles the nightmare search for a lost loved one, swallowed up by a sham of a judicial system.